Today California (CA) Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (author of the CA open textbook legislation) announced that SB 520 (fact sheet) will be amended to provide open, online college courses for credit. In short, the bill will allow CA students, enrolled in CA public colleges and universities, to take online courses from a pool of 50 high enrollment, introductory courses, offered by 3rd parties, in which CA students cannot currently gain access from their public CA university or community college. Students must already be enrolled in the CA college or university in which they want to receive credit. The 50 courses and plans for their assessment will be reviewed and approved (or not) by a faculty committee prior to being admitted into this new online course marketplace. Read more...

By Suzanne Bowness. Everything you wanted to know about digital humanities. If you’re old enough to remember a time before the Internet, cast your ears back to this sound: Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkaking tshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding.
That’s right. That’s the irritating – and maybe for some nostalgic – ring of an old-fashioned modem connecting your computer to the Internet (with phonetics borrowed from The Atlantic).
Now, imagine yourself back in the era when that sound was a novelty, particularly in the quiet halls of an English or history department, where the loudest ambient noise up to that point may have been the quiet swish of pages turning. Or perhaps a pencil scraping lightly at their margins. If you were that reader, hearing that “ding” for the first time, you might have looked up from your book and wondered what exactly was going on. You might have heard the birth of a new discipline called the digital humanities.
For most digital humanities scholars, even that time-frame of the mid-1990s is a bit late. They date the field’s origins to well before modems and the Internet, although at first it didn’t really have a name until it was called humanities computing and later, digital humanities. Read more...

By Tema Frank. Alumni departments turn to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and more, to engage alumni. This past October, when Felix Baumgartner became the first person to break the sound barrier in a free-fall jump from the stratosphere, the alumni relations department at McGill University realized that the person who designed the outfit used for the jump was a McGill graduate. Within hours, the department had posted an article about the designer on three separate Facebook pages: that of the alumni department, the faculty he’d graduated from, and a volunteer-run branch of alumni. The opportunity to piggyback on news to deepen connections with alumni is one of the many ways social media can benefit university alumni and development offices across Canada. “We need to be where our alumni are,” says Derek Cassoff, director of communications for McGill’s office of development and alumni relations. “We need to be in their newsfeeds.”
And the alumni are decisively there – on all platforms of social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. More than 90 percent of online adults now use social media regularly (according to the U.S. 2012 Digital Marketer Benchmark and Trend Report) and younger alumni prefer to communicate by social media rather than by email or print. This means that social media is no longer optional for effective communications with alumni. Read more...

By Elliot King and Neil Alperstein. The debate about massively open online courses, or MOOCs, has reached such a fevered pitch that we recently got to witness an internecine argument about it at the New York Times.
On one side was the technology-optimist columnist Thomas Friedman, who imagines a time when students in a remote village in Egypt could install a couple of computers with high-speed Internet access, hire a local facilitator and study with the best professors in the world.
On the other side, the Times editorial board felt compelled to point out that most online courses are pretty dreadful, with high dropout rates and poor learning outcomes.
Of course, online education and its first incarnation, distance learning, have been around for a long time. MOOCs have leapt onto the front pages because of their scale -- 10,000, 100,000, 200,000 students -- and the name-brand schools involved. Students can study with M.I.T. professors. Wow. As exciting as that may sound, the shortcomings and challenges have also been well known for years. Read more...

By Simona Chiose. What began last year as a technology upgrade in education has more recently become a revolution meme. At last week’s South by Southwest Edu conference (the education partner to the SXSW music and film festival), almost a dozen panels were devoted to the subject of massive open online courses. Known by the rather bovine acronym MOOC, the latest iteration of online learning was debated in panels with titles like Online Education: Will It Make Us Smarter? and Not Another Zombie Idea. Read more...

By Jim Lotz. University education has been described as the process whereby the notes of the professor become those of the student, without going through the minds of either. The lecture system began in early medieval Europe when the gilded youth of the time gathered to learn from scholars who had access to books and who had acquired much wisdom from other sources.
Universities remained elite institutions until after the Second World War, when demand for advanced education exploded. Governments poured money into existing universities as they expanded, and encouraged the creation of new ones. The lecture system remained the basis of teaching, even as knowledge in all fields expanded at an exponential rate. Read more...

By Michael Woods. Three-year total reaches $716 M. The federal government plans to write off $173 million in unpaid student loans in the coming fiscal year, which will bring its three-year writeoff total to $716 million.
Taxpayers were on the hook for $312 million in Canada Student Loan writeoffs in the 201112 fiscal year and $231 million in the current fiscal year (201213), although the loans in question span many years.
Most student finance experts say forgiving unpaid student debt is simply the cost of doing business, with the government taking on risk to help thousands of people get an education who otherwise couldn't afford it. They also say the federal student loans system is simpler and more forgiving than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Read more...